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Transitions is the blog companion of the Center for the Advanced Study of India’s bi-weekly online publication, India in Transition (IiT). IiT presents brief, analytical perspectives on the ongoing transformations in contemporary India based on cutting-edge research in the areas of economy, environment, foreign policy and security, human capital, science and technology, and society and culture. A Hindi translation accompanies each published article and can be found on CASI’s website along with related online resources.

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The Hindu published the final part of our 4-part series on the Aspirations and Anxieties round of the Lok Surveys on Friday February 27. The article, “Unsafe after sunset”, highlights how respondents answered the question, “What is the latest time that you feel safe returning home alone?” and was written by Milan Vaishnav of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Neelanjan Sircar of CASI.

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In the third installment of CASI’s 4-part series in The Hindu, we discuss findings from the latest round of the Lok Surveys on questions related to gender. We find that attitudes on the appropriateness of women’s clothing, which we feel to be a measure of social control, are quite different between rural and urban India. The urban, wealthier, and more educated were the least conservative about what women should wear. However, when we examined the preference that respondents have for sons over daughters, levels of son preference did not vary significantly by the income level, education, or rural/urban status of the respondent, highlighting how deeply rooted this attitude remains in Indian society. Read the article “The love for sons and appropriate clothing” by Megan Reed and Devesh Kapur.

Read new analysis from the Lok Surveys on social bias in today’s The Hindu. This article comes as the latest installment of a four-part series presenting results from the second round of the Lok Surveys. In the article, CASI’s Post-doctoral Research Fellow Neelanjan Sircar and Research Coordinator Megan Reed discuss findings regarding caste and religious bias in preferences for neighbors. Those identifying as middle class displayed much higher levels of social bias than those who do not. To the extent that the social mobility associated with middle class identification results in people from different identity groups competing for the same jobs and resources, middle class identity, we speculate, may actually amplify rather than attenuate social conflict explaining this difference is reported bias. Read more of the findings in “Choosing thy Neighbour.”

CASI has just released new analysis from the second round of the Lok Surveys! The article, the first in a four-part series to be published in The Hindu, is the first public presentation of the emerging findings from the Aspirations and Anxietiesround of the survey. The Lok Surveys are a multi-year panel study sponsored by the Lok Foundation and carried out in collaboration with the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania, in conjunction with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Lok Surveys aim to track the attitudes of Indians over the next several years, as part of a significant new effort to understand the social and political reconfigurations taking place across India today. CMIE, on behalf of the Lok Foundation, conducted face-to-face interviews of 69,920 randomly selected Indians across 25 states and union territories between January and May 2014. Because our sample is about two-thirds urban and one-third rural, 2011 Census data is used to reweight the sample to ensure urban/rural representativeness.